After diving a few days, I joined a tour to the massive Corcovado National Park (42,000+ hectares of land area). They’ve somewhat commoditized and package-ized the outdoor experiences here, which ruffled some of my meander-leaning feathers. This was before the bad dive and the whales, so I was still uncertain of my feelings for the place overall. But I went in with an open mind, a camera, a lot of water, and a desire to see some cool critters.
Check-in at 5:45, load onto the boat at 6, disembark and check-in at the ranger station, bag check for illicit food and plastic (Corcovado is very strict), and we’re ready to go into the park. In my group of 10 was a very nice Italian couple, a trio of French women, and a few others. We walked the trails slowly, with the guide stopping every 50 metres or so to point something out. It felt like he was acting the “guide” part a bit, with a flourish of his scope each time we stopped. Despite the showmanship and the production value, the trails were nice and we managed to see some indigenous species: 2 sloths, 3 tapirs, a smattering of birds and reptiles, a coatimundi, an agouti, and a partridge in a pear tree. Actually, a partridge-type thing (a tinamou), a great curassow, a couple of crested guans, a chachalaca (which is a great sighting if for the name alone), and others.
1 / 7
All-in-all, it felt canned. Like walking through a ‘nature park experience’ rather than hiking through primary and secondary rainforest. And, while I’m not regretful that I went, I’d likely sign up for a different experience if I go again. When I got back to Drake Bay, I booked some time with a local guide to go birdwatching.
The highlight of the day: a couple of Imperials (the local beer) with the Italian couple, some very decent ceviche, and fun conversation, culminating in them urging me to reconsider my domicile in these very bizarre times.
I rode out the hottest heat of the afternoon on the balcony of my hotel room doing some napping and lazy birdwatching from the hammock. The cacophony begins at dusk, when the cicadas announce the exact moment of sunset. It’s amazing, really, the scissor-like crescendo of their song. Track 2 to the evening symphony is the squawking chorus of scarlet macaws as they make their way, 2-by-2 into the jungle to sleep.
I met up with the local birding guide the next day with honestly low expectations after my Corcovado experience. But the magic of the whales prevailed and it ended up being a lovely, if a tad wet bird walk (we got caught in a tropical downpour while looking for toucans), making the memory better, if soggy.
2 / 7
If you are in Drake Bay, I highly recommend William Mora Gomez as a guide. He knows the area like the back of his hand, and his passion for birds and local wildlife shines through.
We ended up going on 2 outings, each time seeing more and more local birds and wildlife. The 2nd walk we took, William had rescued a baby white-face capuchin earlier in the day. The little monkey had gotten zapped on an overhead wire, and William reunited him with his troop. We walked by the same area a couple of hours later and the monkeys were still there, maybe waiting to give some good photo ops in gratitude. I’m anthropomorphizing of course, but it’s nice to wonder if they remember the good humans.
This inspired me to take my own late afternoon walks in-between lazing and diving. Birdwatching is good for the spirit. Looking through a viewfinder focuses your attention and silences the ridiculous chatter in your mind. A nonsense self-conversation about what’s going to happen in 4 days when you’re back in the real world has no chance against a chance sighting of a red-lored Amazon parrot with mate sitting on a nest, close encounters with rufous-tailed hummingbirds, cartoon-ish sightings of fiery-billed aracaris and yellow-throated toucans. Lineated woodpeckers.
It was during these walks, despite the heat, despite the prices (I still have no idea how people without a hefty vacation budget can afford to live there), despite the touristic-centricity, that I came to really appreciate the Pura Vida, pure life, aspect of Costa Rica.
There is a concept in my yoga practice called Iccha: the willingness to allow something, or the opening up to what might be. It had been a long time since I’d really, purely tapped into this energy and it felt like my spirit was trying to come home.
Every year, I create a photo calendar for my friends and family. This year, I’ve printed some extra in advance, and I have them for sale at my photography shop!
While supplies last (or until I can order more), I have 2025 “Big Things are Coming” elephant calendars available.
The calendars are 8-1/2×11, printed on the same heavy stock as my cards, and include photos, anecdotes and little moments of celebration throughout the year.
They are on sale for $28 each. For a limited time, use coupon code 20OFF2025CAL for 20% off!
To order: visit my photography shop, select SHOP, select SPECIALTY PRODUCTS, and scroll down to the calendar, pick a quantity, and ADD TO CART (I have yet to figure out how to do a direct link to the item or to have it appear on top of the list…).
Shop > Specialty products > scroll down > choose Calendar > Add to cart!
Thursday night: I landed in Cape Town at 9:30 at night, amid warnings that “the city isn’t safe” and “don’t walk alone” and, especially, “whatever you do, do not hike on Table Mountain alone. There are muggings.”
This last one bit me in the butt a little because one of the things I most wanted to do here in Cape Town was to hike up Table Mountain. So I spent the bulk of my return from Kariega wondering what I was going to do in Cape Town if exploring, hiking, or wandering aimlessly through the city wasn’t safe. I had 3 full days to fill, and I had only a short list of things to do and see.
Thing 1: Penguins. The only species of penguins in all of Africa resides on the southern end of the continent, with the bulk of them living on the Western Cape of South Africa. The African penguin sits squarely on the endangered list, with IUCN indicating that their numbers are in decline. The weird-looking critters were close enough to see, tourists be damned, so I was going to see them!
Thing 2: Table Mountain. Table Mountain and its foothills run like a rugged spine down the Cape, creating a dramatic backdrop. The unique formula of raging unemployment, governmental mis-management, and a drug problem of crisis proportions plus myriad tourists running around the city with giant dollar (euro, pound) signs emblazoned onto their foreheads has equaled a not-so-minor crime problem in this city. I’m of course (unironically) watering down the problem to a few key factors, which have exacerbated during the major drought in this part of the world these past few years. And so, even though there were too many reports of crime on the trails to ignore, I was determined to see the mountain somehow.
Thing 3: The southernmost point. To date, the most-southern point I’d ever been in the world was Kenton-on-Sea, in the Eastern Cape, where I had just come from. So to know that I was really, really close to the southwestern tip of the whole African continent, meant that I just had to try to get there over the next few days.
I have to note that during my 9:30pm ride from airport to guesthouse, I saw on the streets: Not. A. Soul. It was eerie, actually. The car stopped on the deserted street outside the guesthouse, and the Uber driver waited, wordlessly, out of the car, for me to get buzzed-in before he drove off. I was fried, a little sun-scorched, and missing the eles already. So I crashed – hard – and decided to figure out the next few days…tomorrow.
Friday. The easiest (and, as I was advised, safest) way to get around Cape Town is via an Uber. If I had enough days and fewer fears, I probably would have looked into the local train. And I frankly just avoided the “hop on-hop off” bus because I was really just looking for a less herd-like touristic experience. So, app in hand, I Ubered it down from Cape Town to the famous Boulders Beach and its resident population of penguins.
Truth be told, I’ll give the boardwalk out to see the penguins and Boulders a meh. After a hundred metres or so of wall-to-wall selfies with penguins, one can turn around and exit through the gift shop. The beach protection is needed, though, since there are fewer than 11,000 breeding pairs of these penguins remaining and the species could go extinct in the next decade or so. About 10% of the entire population lives right there. I didn’t do a count, but there were a lot of the strange little flightless waterbirds on the beach. 🐧
4 / 7
It was nice to discover a longer path outside of the main area, off the beach and away from the crowd. This path wends its way through some protected penguin nesting areas, where it’s possible to observe the little nuggets without bothering them. It was a surprisingly noisy, yet peaceful, experience: penguins are louder than one might imagine, and there were few tourists down this way, so I’d call it a win. I even encountered what the locals call a dassie…the African hyrax!
Highlight of the afternoon: a stroll back along the path and up to another beach, this time sans tourists. Here, I found a smaller colony of penguins lounging and playing on the rocks and sand. Weird insight: I can now attest that neither penguin courtship nor sex is a quiet sport.
The one thing that stuck with me that day was a conversation with the Uber driver. I had spent the morning with a migraine and got into the car slightly subdued and groggy from a nap. The driver was amiable enough, and so as he drove, we chatted, and he mentioned that he lived in a township just outside the city. I asked how it was, and he answered, “It’s poor but okay. I’m saving money for my family.” We talked about the expansive beaches, white sharks, the recent forest fires…as the subject changed from where do you stayto more touristic things, I thought little of the conversation until later the next day.
Saturday. It was About an hour into my day-long tour with an amazing local guide, Shafiek from In2Africa Tours (hint: if you are in Cape Town, please let me know and I’ll get you his contact info!), that he began to talk about the neighbourhoods and communities in and around Cape Town – and the social structures therein.
And so, I learnt a new definition I didn’t know I needed. Until that moment, I hadn’t realised that here, a “township” is no more than a favela or shantytown, remnants of worker housing encampments established during apartheid, now transformed into sprawling stretches of shacks and tin-roofed huts, interspersed with rubbish heaps, precariously spiderwebbed together by pirated electrical and cable lines. People live here because even though Apartheid ended 30 years ago this week, wage disparity, majority white land ownership, and rampant unemployment prevail.
It made me feel self-conscious, privileged, a little bit ashamed.
Having done a lot of work in affordable housing at home, it also struck me not for the first time this trip, that while where I was in South Africa didn’t really feel like Africa-Africa, its first-world façade hides the cracks underneath. Back home too. A clean, comfortable, safe place to live is a basic human necessity. Maslow, meet Cape Town.
Putting out of mind for the moment the things that were entirely out of my control, I focused on trying to muster excitement towards the day’s itinerary: another trip down the coast, but this time all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point via the Atlantic side, and a checklist of sights to see and things to do. My guide did an amazing job of creating an itinerary of less-touristy, nature-oriented attractions. The day went well: we wended our way through the different coastal towns, the cliffside homes looking precarious on the rocky slopes. A small boat ride took me to see a nearby harbour island called Seal Island, and its residents Arctocephalus pusillus, or Cape fur seals. The genus translates to “bear head”. Go figure.
6 / 6
Back on shore, we weaved our way across the beautiful Chapman’s Peak Drive, which was built into the side of the mountain in the early 1900s, only to be closed nearly a century later due to rockslides for more than a decade. Three Ts helped it come back to life in its current iteration: technology, tourists, and tolls, giving better commutes to locals and better access to the geological and botanical wonders of the mountain to all (or at least all who wish to pay for the privilege). Apparently 2 species of Fynbos occur here on the Cape and nowhere else on earth.
Down the Cape we went, passing Simons Town again, and landing at the Cape of Good Hope, where I ventured up to the old Cape Point lighthouse (the new one is apparently lower and brighter, hence safer!) and then down again via the absolutely lovely Kaap die Goeie Hoop-voetpad overlooking Dias beach, leading down to the Cape of Good Hope proper.
Unexpected animal behaviour.
In this part of the Cape, ostriches and baboons and eland live by the sea. And while there are “caution: baboons” signs everywhere, the individuals I saw seemed almost introspective, meditative. This group of baboons has apparently evolved to eat fish and mussels. Snacks snatched from unsuspecting tourists serve as fillers. Luckily, The baboons I observed seemed much more concerned with the ocean than with my snacks. Which I dutifully left in the car.
A note in an exhibit in the visitor center sums it up nicely:
Since the beginning of our species, our survival has depended on our knowledge of nature, our original Mother. All early humans understood nature intimately, and saw other species as kin. With the environmental crisis looming, now more than ever, we need to draw on our ancestors’ wisdom. We have compromised our life support system, which is the biodiversity of our planet. We need to rebuild our threads to the wild, because ultimately our connection to nature will determine our survival.
We need to remember that we are nature, we are not separate.
Animals, encountered; points, pinned; we headed back towards Cape Town on the False Bay side, stopping for photos in Muzienberg and some other scenic towns along the way before spending a few minutes wandering the early evening streets of Bo Kaap, the Muslim section of town, and grabbing some street food to bring back for dinner. With Ramadan in full swing and the shops closing early for iftar, the breaking of the fast, I had a plan for Monday morning before I headed to the airport: a visit to the much-renowned Atlas Spice Shop there.
Sunday arrived and I made a plan to see Table Mountain. I decided to take the cablecar up and down and do as much hiking at the top as I could. Sun shining, I crossed fingers against the potential for mid-afternoon fog that could envelop the mountaintop in minutes. After wandering around the close-to-base paths for a bit, I stumbled upon a trail snaking through the scrappy and rocky terrain and bounded by the Fynbos mentioned earlier. It felt like the moon, like being above treeline but here there are really no trees, regardless that it isn’t even that high (1,086 metres/3,563 feet), compared with highest peak in S. Africa at nearly 3x its height. Little black lizards darted around the rocks. I saw another couple of dassies. And some of the very alien-like king protea flowers! Few humans were on this section of trail, but I bumped into a small group of Brits and fell in with their local guide for a while. He was leading them to Maclear’s Beacon, the highest point of Table Mountain and used by cartographers as a triangulation station. The hike wasn’t terribly challenging, but checked the boxes next to “hike” and “views” for the day!
9 / 15
As I was decidedly not done exploring, I decided to venture to the waterfront.
It felt like adjectives juxtaposed in close proximity: sketchy and industrial, shmancy and touristy. A stark illustration of what lies just a scratch beneath the surface. So I wandered around the wharf (deemed safe, as evidenced by the preponderance of armed guards), ogled the ginormous seals on the dock, then ducked into a Turkish restaurant and had a fantastic late lunch before getting out of dodge.
Monday. I spent my last morning spice-shopping, getting harassed by creepy men on the streets of Bo Kaap, chatting with the lovely owner of the guesthouse, skritching the head of the neighbour’s lab puppy through the gate, and gratefully transiting to the airport for my flight home.
10 / 6
And like that the trip was at its end. This one felt too short: I wanted more time with nature, with the gentle giants back at Kariega, with the birds and the wild things. While I don’t feel any great need to go back to Cape Town, I have it in my heart to go back to Kariega and to work again with Bring the Elephant Home in the (foreseeable) future.
Just in case you don’t want to scroll all the way up to the top find the links to the earlier blogs from the trip:
And I’ve put loads of shots from this trip and beyond into my photography shop… you can order prints, cards and more of many of the pics in this post (and more). And use the code TGM-15 for a 15% discount.
What draws us to elephants is a mystery. Or is it? They represent wisdom and strength and empathy. They are revered in Thailand and in India and elsewhere in Asia. Ganesh is the Hindu elephant god of new beginnings, the remover of obstacles and bringer of wisdom and luck. His name in Thailand is Phra Phikanet.
Across Asia and Africa, these magical and mystical creatures are worshipped in temples and simultaneously loathed in the fields, where their land is being encroached upon by farms and development. A mere “drive by” by a herd can decimate a family’s crops in minutes.
I think I’ve always been charmed by the magic of elephants, intrigued by their human-like behaviours, disgusted by humans’ treatment of them and their habitat. My first visit to Africa gave me a up-close look into those long-eyelashed orbs and I was smitten. It’s not a secret that Ganesh is something of my patron saint, and it’s certainly no surprise that I’m something of a wildlife freak. So when an opportunity to participate in Bring the Elephant Home’s volunteer program, assisting scientists with crucial behavioral research to learn more about social structure, welfare and habitat usage, I couldn’t apply fast enough.
Fast-forward 8 or 9 months, and I’m beginning to pen this on my flight home, coming down from the elephant high that has been my status quo for the last couple of weeks.
I joined the group in Port Elizabeth (recently renamed to Gqeberha), on the Eastern Cape of South Africa: a couple from the UK, a handful of Californians, and a student studying ele behaviour at a University in Johannesburg. From PE, we went up to our post at the Kariega Conservation Center at the Kariega Game Reserve. I posted a blog at the beginning of our time there called What Happens When You Drop a Fence, outlining our initial observations and the main research objectives.
What was it like?
So the 8 of us volunteers, 2 PhD researchers, and a local ecologist ventured out into the thicket of Kariega Game Reserve each day looking for elephants. While like something out of a dream, it also felt much harder than it seemed like it should have been. One might think elephants are so big, and how could you miss them, right? Well, crazy ele fact #1: they move silently. I mean, so silently that you could be sitting in a spot for a while and see or hear nothing, but a moment later, you could glance over your shoulder and see an animal the size of a Land Cruiser standing just metres away, trunk curled, sniffing in your general direction. While you’d think they’d make themselves known by heavy footsteps, their massive feet are so cushioned that they walk as if clad in slippers. In fact, more often than not, we’d know they were nearby only from the branches snapping rather than anything else (the tracking collars, when working, didn’t hurt either 😉).
Day 1
That first afternoon we went out on a game drive to get our sea legs, as it were… we saw zebra and white rhinos and giraffes and warthogs (Pumba!) and of course a few elephants. Even though it was just a couple of hours on the reserve, and we got a flat tire just before dusk and had to wait a while for another vehicle to come and bring us a spare and a new jack, it didn’t feel like a harbinger of doom for the week. Instead, it felt like the beginning of a cool adventure. Especially when I looked up and realised that the giraffes we had been watching on the other side of a hill began to creep in closer to get a peek at what we were up to out there in the scrubby thicket.
The first full day was a series of lectures on why we were there, classes on how to do elephant identification, exercises in what to look for, behaviour-wise, and a slew of what to do when things around age and sex and different behaviours and dung sampling and using the Zoomonitor app to record said behaviours. It felt like a lot.
I mentioned to my manager that we had elephant school that first day. He replied that he had heard they are good learners. Us humans, though… the jury was still out.
One of the first lessons was ageing elephants. It’s done by relative size, facial features, and behavioral characteristics. Calves (<1) can walk underneath an adult cow. Juveniles (1-4) are still suckling but may or may not have tusk buds (squeee!!!). While Intermediates (5-8) may or may not look like sub-adults (9-15), they are weaned and the females take on more and more “big sister” duties. Sub-adult bulls spend less and less time in the center of the herd as they mature and become more independent (and, you know, more like naughty teenage boys!). Adults (15 and up) come in different shapes and sizes, depending on whether they are bull or cow. I learnt so much just this first day on these different stages, not least that bulls don’t even come into their first musth until they are about 25, while cows can start having their own calves by about 11.
Once we had a decent grasp on ageing, we moved on to sexing (size, head shape, body configuration, rear view). About half-way through this lesson I felt like I might fail elephant school altogether, so I was glad that the professionals would be with us in the vehicle to help out with our ID follies!
The team uses the SEEK (System for Elephant Ear Knowledge) system which incorporates a set of features and markings in addition to body condition on a scale from 1 (emaciated) to 5 (chubbo) to identify and code the targets of our observations. I’m grateful for the visual aids we were given, as well as the Elephant Voices ethogram website which we were encouraged to review prior to arriving. This was beginning to feel like work.
The last part of our training day was to review the different behaviours we were to observe and track: continuous behaviours like locomotion, grazing, browsing (and identifying the differences therein), and all-occurrence behaviours like head shake, sniff, play spar, trunk curl, trunk to face (and whose trunk to or from whose face)… again I was appreciative of the technology at hand – the app into which we were to record said behaviours and the myriad PowerPoint decks and references that had been prepared for us novices.
12 / 6
As the long day wound down, we received our marching orders: review the materials and get ready for an early wake up call. We were going into the field in the morning, then breaking up into groups of 3, one to observe behaviour, one to do elephant ID, and one to be the photographer.
One can only guess which role I was more than glad to take on.
Stay tuned for more adventures from a citizen-scientist perspective. And be sure to take a look at Bring the Elephant Home’s updates page for more stories from our time at Kariega.
THIS JUST IN: I just launched my new print store… take a look HERE. And use coupon code TGM-15 for a 15% site-wide discount!
After Amber Mountain, I arrived at my lodging, nestled nicely in the forest on the edges of the Réserve Spéciale d’Ankarana. Compared with the previous night’s lodge where I felt like an over-catered-to tourist, the Ankarana Lodge felt homey and perfect in its unassuming way. After checking in, the first thing I was asked was what I wanted for dinner. And though I had become used to this courtesy, it continued to strike me as brilliant simplicity. For most of the meals I took here, one had to order ahead, sometimes up to a day in advance. It made perfect sense because they are using local ingredients and buying only what’s needed on each day. For me it was also an opportunity to do some quiet self-reflection on both sustainability and privilege. Excess food is a privilege. Refrigeration is a privilege. The magnitude of choices available in the developed world is a privilege (and, frankly, also somewhat absurd IMHO). At one point during the trip, I commented on the generous meals served and was assured that “nothing goes to waste here.”
I had a few hours to kill in the heat of the day between that morning’s hike in Amber Mountain and the evening night walk I had scheduled with one of the lodge’s naturalists. Ankarana sits at a lower elevation than Amber Mountain. That, combined with the heat absorbed by the nearby Tsingy formations plus the unseasonable heat here, left the air tropical and thick and the ground feeling like it could melt your feet, tested and confirmed by my walking barefoot to read by the pool, only realising too late that my only saving grace would be to dunk the feet in said pool and either wait out the heat or hopscotch back to my room as quickly as possible while chanting the local remedy mantra: “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ouch! FFS! Oof…” Read this recent article in The Guardian on the October Madagascar heatwave.
In which I meet the thing I like least about Madagascar.
That evening, I met up with a kind local guide who led me through the trails in and around the lodge. We hiked around for an hour or so in search of night chameleons and the very cute and very nocturnal mouse lemur. As we came around one corner of the trail, he excitedly called me over to look closely at a palm frond. In it is resting a ginormous insect with too many legs and too-long antenna things. I am noticeably horrified and ask if it is going to fly at or jump on me. Grinning, the guide says something to the effect of non, il n’a pas des ailles. It doesn’t really matter that it doesn’t have wings, more that it just exists is a problem was my response. This, my guide tells me, is the cockroach (the Madagascar hissing cockroach to be exact). And my brain flashes on the fact that people in my part of the world keep these things as PETS! Gah! This, I tell him, is the most horrible thing about Madagascar. As he tries to explain to me their purpose: they are recyclers – they eat rotting plants and bugs to help break down organic matter in the forests, I agree their role is important but wonder to myself if this role could be filled by something much less terrifying.
I’m eager to move on and spot some less-frightening critters. Which we did: we saw some sleeping magpie-robins, some skittering mouse lemurs, and a humongous panther chameleon sleeping in the big tree near the entrance of the lodge.
I got into bed that night thankful that hissing cockroaches prefer to sleep in travellers palms and not traveller’s beds!
Tsingy Rary: Défense de tomber.
A note about the tsingy: I am sorry to report that Tsingy Rouge is, apparently, an imposter. Or, rather, a geologic novelty with aspirations of tsingy grandeur. So while I’m loath to call Tsingy Rouge not-a-tsingy, I think just maybe it’s riding the coattails of its sharper and more massif (sic) national park cousins. I say this because the real tsingy is actually a limestone karst landscape, and is organised in formations, some of which UNESCO calls a “forest of limestone needles” in the Andrefana Dry Forests on its World Heritage Sites list.
Apropos, in Malagasy, tsingy means “the place where one cannot walk barefoot”.
And so as we set out for Ankarana early the following morning, I had firm instructions: bring a hat and sun cream; wear hiking boots. We were going to see Tsingy Rary.
While rocks were our primary objective for the day, we found ourselves on several kilometres of beautiful trails beforehand, and saw a few Sandford’s brown lemurs and the wide-eyed Ankarana sportive lemur, as well as a pair of beautiful Madagascar Scops-owls. Despite the efforts of a group of Italian tourists to chat up the forest, it was really a spectacular hike… I could have marched around this place for days!
13 / 8
After a while in the forest, we arrive at a clearing where my guide signals we should stop, as he makes sure I’ve got my hat and sun cream on and gives me some words of caution: défense de tomber.In other words, there is only one rule: no falling. On that note, we continue over boulders that are becoming markedly more razor-like with every step. This is where I understand why one cannot walk barefoot here. The forest of limestone needles has begun. It is as spiny as it is vast, with the weird gray rock formations as far as the eye can see.
We traverse the exposed tsingy field, arriving at a long wooden footbridge that crosses a tsingy gorge. While I am not particularly afraid of heights per se, I am particularly uneasy around high and precarious situations that I might fall off of, backwards. And so, hands gripping the rails, I tuck in my fears and cross the bridge. Only to find another one, shorter but more precarious, waiting for me at the end of the next narrow and quite sharp stretch of tsingy. Défense de tomber indeed. This mantra will play in my head for the next 3 days.
14 / 6
We exit the Tsingy Rary via another really nice, forested trail, my guide pointing out the baobabs and other endangered flora as we walk to our outdoor picnic spot. We had ordered lunch from a woman in a little house earlier in the morning, and as we waited for the food to arrive we were entertained by a cheeky family of crowned lemurs honing in on a German family’s mangoes. One sassy lemur would hop down on the table and do the distraction dance while one or two of the others would come around the back and grab their objects of desire (baguettes and mangoes appeared to be their favourite). Note the baby in a couple of the photos (and its little hand jutting out from below its mother while in a tree nursing):
15 / 11
Luckily, the lemurs appeared to be mangoed-out by the time we had our lunch, so I got great photo opps and we were able to keep our mangoes for ourselves.
While it was blazing hot out (I think the thermometer read 38 in the shade that day), this didn’t dissuade me from wanting to explore more tsingys! Good call, because the next day we’d be going to what would turn out to be one of the most delightful lodges I’d ever stayed at: Iharana Bush Camp, and with it their own private tsingy.
Stay tuned for more stories and thoughts from Madagascar!
